Other than the name and location, it will be pretty much business as usual. Baseball, the Bronx and, of course, the eternal question: How did Brett Favre trick us into ignoring the disparity between the spelling and pronunciation of his last name?

I want to thank those of you who have been my faithful readers. YSCC has been one of the greatest joys in my life, and I couldn't have done it without you. Well, I could have. But I have low self-esteem, so I probably wouldn't have for long.

So, to send this thing off in style, I think we all know what we need to do. Once more, in unison, for old time's sake, and with a heavy heart: You Suck Coco Crisp.

Well, if you thought that we had finally hit rock bottom—that things could only get better in the world of baseball by virtue of the fact that there was no human way imaginable that they could ever get worse, think again.

Apparently, the Joliet Jackhammers, an unaffiliated Illinois baseball team in the Northern League have offered former Governor Rod Blahblahblahgoveich a contract.

Yeah, like to play baseball.

When I first read about it, I thought, “Now, don’t be cynical, Melanie. Just because this has all the appearances of a really tacky publicity stunt, you shouldn’t assume that it is. Give the good people of Joliet a little credit. After all, they are from the Midwest. Maybe they just really thought this particular forty-two year old with no experience in the sport looked like a good prospect.”

But then I read about "Bobble-Hair Night."

And that’s not the only clever promotional idea the marketing team at the Jackhammers has come up with. They will also be selling special "Golden" seats and have dubbed the whole concept as "pay him to play."

Congratulations, Jackhammers. You’ve found a way to capitalize on both the sad state of your local political system and your sport all in one shot. Not to mention that you are in direction violation of the principle of separation of sports and state.

As a lover of baseball and Midwestern values, all I have to say in response to this shameful mockery is that I will be cheering for the Fargo-Moorhead Redhawks for the duration of the Northern League season. Previously, I hadn’t planned on following this season at all because I hadn’t heard of the league, but whatever. I’m flexible.

So, after a couple of days of listening to us all say that the best thing that A-Roid could possibly do at this point was confess, he confessed. I mean, duh. He saw how we received those who did (Giambi and Pettitte) as compared to how we shunned those who didn’t (Palmeiro and Clemens). After all, the only thing we hate more than a cheat, is a liar and a cheat.

A-Rod’s Mea culpa came in the form of a hard-hitting interview by ESPN’s Peter Gammons, a guy who isn’t afraid to ask the easy questions in a nice tone of voice. A-Rod wore blue. To bring out the color of his eyes.

All in all, it was extremely informative. And by informative, I mean wasteful of everyone’s time. Here are some gems from the transcript along with my commentary.

PETER GAMMONS: What kind of substances were you taking?ALEX RODRIGUEZ: Peter, that's the thing. Again, it was such a loosey-goosey era. I'm guilty for a lot of things. I'm guilty for being negligent, naive, not asking all the right questions. And to be quite honest, I don't know exactly what substance I was guilty of using.

I don’t get this. At all. Why would anyone ever think that it worked in his favor to act as though he didn’t know exactly what he was taking? ( Something I don’t believe for a second, by the way.) I mean, it was the act of knowingly taking any banned substance that put A-Rod on shaky moral ground. If he really didn’t know specifically which ones he was using—well, that just makes us question his intelligence as well as his values.

PETER GAMMONS: Where did you originally get the substance?ALEX RODRIGUEZ: Again, at the time, you know, you have nutritionists, you have doctors, you have trainers. That's the right question today: Where did you get it? We're in the era of BALCO ... Back then, it was just about what.

That’s funny. Because I thought that back then, and I quote, “I don’t know exactly what substance I was guilty of using.”

There's many things that you can take that are banned substances. I mean, there's things that have been removed from GNC today that would trigger a positive test.

Oh, I see. He pretended not to know “what” in order to trick us into thinking it was something that might have come from GNC. Now I get it.

PETER GAMMONS: You're saying that the time period was 2001, '2 and '3?ALEX RODRIGUEZ: That's pretty accurate, yes.“Pretty accurate?” I like that. Open to interpretation. Loosey-goosey, even. Like the steroids era. PETER GAMMONS: How much of the culture -- how prevalent was this culture in Texas at that time?ALEX RODRIGUEZ: You know, I've always been a guy that raced my own race. And I don't like to look left, I don't like to look right. You just feel there's an energy. To say only Texas, that wouldn't be fair. But overall, you felt that there was -- I felt a tremendous pressure to play and play really well. I felt like I was going up against the whole world. I just signed this enormous contract. I got unbelievable negative press, for lack of a better term, for [Rangers owner] Tom Hicks and I teaming up together...

So I felt that I needed something, without over-investigating what I was taking, to get me to the next level.

Huh? So he races his own race and isn’t influenced by the people to his right or to his left. But…he IS influenced by the energy. And the negative press. And the culture. Oh, OK. Now I understand.PETER GAMMONS: How long was it before you found out that what you were doing was actually illegal?ALEX RODRIGUEZ: Again, at the time of that culture, there was no illegal or legal. It was just -- you have to understand the time. To take you back there, again, people were taking a number of different things, from GNC, to whatever.

Uh, yeah. I’m pretty sure that there was a legal and illegal. And, again, pretty sure that nothing that could be found at GNC made A-Rod fail his pee test.PETER GAMMONS: Now, you mentioned the Katie Couric interview. You were asked if you ever used steroids, human growth hormones or other performance-enhancing substances. You said no, flat-out no. In your mind, that wasn't a lie?ALEX RODRIGUEZ: At the time, Peter, I wasn't even being truthful with myself. How am I going to be truthful with Katie or CBS?

Congratulations, A-Rod. Best excuse for lying ever. PETER GAMMONS: Now, Jose Canseco talked a lot in his books about you. He claimed in his last book that he hooked you up with a guy that was very well acquainted with performance-enhancing drugs here in Miami. Is that true?ALEX RODRIGUEZ: That couldn't be more false. That's a hundred percent not true.

Or…is this just one of those times when A-Rod’s not being truthful with us because he’s not being truthful with himself?

PETER GAMMONS: You were tested during the WBC [World Baseball Classic] in 2006, is that correct?ALEX RODRIGUEZ: Correct. I got tested in 2006. And also this year when I go down to Puerto Rico, I'm sure I'll get tested again in 2009.

Prior to Texas, I really had -- at that time in Seattle, I had never even heard of a player taking a substance, a steroid of any kind in my Seattle days. I mean, I know this lady from Sports Illustrated, Selena Roberts, is trying to throw things out there that in high school I tried steroids. I mean, that's the biggest bunch of baloney I've ever heard in my life.

I mean, what makes me upset is that Sports Illustrated pays this lady, Selena Roberts, to stalk me. This lady has been thrown out of my apartment in New York City. This lady has five days ago just been thrown out of the University of Miami police for trespassing. And four days ago she tried to break into my house where my girls are up there sleeping, and got cited by the Miami Beach police. I have the paper here. This lady is coming out with all these allegations, all these lies because she's writing an article for Sports Illustrated and she's coming out with a book in May.

Not only does A-Rod’s rant bear little-to-no relation to the question, but I would say that shooting the messenger is an extremely ill-advised tactic for a man in the middle of an admission of guilt. Leaving aside the fact that everything he says about Selena Roberts is unverified, by accusing his accuser, he sort of kills that whole contrite man in the blue sweater thing he has going. PETER GAMMONS: Given the opportunity, would you like to go to Major League Baseball and say, "OK, what can I do to help kids across the country?"ALEX RODRIGUEZ: 100 percent.

Wow. Talk about gotcha journalism.

In case anyone’s interested in what I think A-Rod should have said, it would have been more like, “At the time, I knew what I was doing was wrong, and I knew it was illegal; I did anyway. I have no excuses and no one to blame but myself. Oh, and I lied to Katie Couric. Obviously.”

Do I think the stuff about being young and feeling pressure was probably true? Sure. Do I think you say any of that stuff in an apology? No. I think apologies never involve excuses. And just because someone says, “There are no excuses,” it doesn’t mean we don’t register all the excuses he makes when he makes a bunch of them.

So, all in all, I thought it was pretty weak.

I don’t think that A-Rod is faking the humiliation. I mean, it’s humiliating. And despite what A-Rod said about the race and looking to the right, this is a guy who is deeply invested in public opinion. So I do think that he sincerely feels bad. It’s just that I think he feels bad about the fact that people think bad things about him rather than about his actions. In short, I don’t think he regrets what he did so much as that I think that he regrets that he got busted.

But one thing's for sure; next time I get caught in a lie, I’m totally saying, “At the time, I wasn’t even being truthful with myself. How am I going to be truthful with you?”

Either A-Rod’s more clever than I thought, or he got a hand from the likes of hip hopera artist R. Kelly with that one.

Monday, February 9, 2009

I would like to take a moment to respond to what a couple of my readers had to say about my post, “A Schilling For Your Thoughts.”

My reader, Josh, wrote, “In principle, I agree with Schilling. The fans deserve full disclosure from the Union. And the players who didn't use deserve to be vindicated.”

Blindbejeezus commented, “Don't let those pinstripe patterned glasses make you hate curt for saying something good. Screw what is possible and what is not, is there another player out there saying what is PLAINLY obvious at this point: The power currently wielded by the MLBPA has been bad for baseball ($$$ aside). The union has screwed the sport. I'm ready to bring collusion back.”

I want to make an important distinction.

I agree with both Josh and Jeez on one point: I think that the MLBPA does a major disservice to all of the players who aren’t juiced by covering up for the ones who are. Moreover, I think that part of the MLBPA's obligation as a union is to create a fair and safe working environment for everyone in baseball—an environment which obviously can’t exist as long as steroids are such a huge part of the game. This was, in fact, the subject of my piece, “Nothing Against A-Roid.”

So, in short: Do I think that the MLBPA should have agreed to the confidentiality terms of that collective bargaining agreement? No. Do I think they could have done more in the past to put an end to all this nonsense? Absolutely. Is there more they could and should be doing now? Obviously.

However, it doesn’t change the fact that the terms of that agreement were binding. Case closed. End of story. And just because we WANT to be able to know the names of those 104 players, we can’t demand that those terms be nullified. It’s simply not how the law works.

Here’s the problem: While the corruption in this case may be obvious enough for the breach of confidentiality to seem warranted, where do we draw the line? Maybe I’m just nostalgic for those two months I spent in law school, but you get into dangerous terrain when you talk about rewriting the law under certain circumstance when morality deems it reasonable.

So, while I think there’s nothing to be done with those tests that were taken in confidence—except wait for more of the names to be leaked—I do agree with both of you that the MLBPA needs to start getting its act together and cracking down on this situation like now. If the MLBPA and MLB combined forces and made a sincere effort to get steroids out of the sport, you wouldn’t eliminate them entirely, but you’d come a hell of a lot closer.

On another note, for those of you who haven’t already, you should check out Josh’s blog—Jews in Baseball. It’s about, well, exactly what you think it would be about, and it’s always a delightful read.

In a recent interview with the La Times about his failure to negotiate a deal with anyone as of yet, Manny Ramirez said, “We're in the seventh inning and I'm waiting for my pitch.”

Adorable.

But here’s the thing about that: When you’re 0-2, you can’t exactly afford to wait for your pitch.

Manny has said of his stint in LA, "I enjoyed the time I spent there. The reporters treated me well. They treated me with respect. When I needed my 15 minutes to go to the cages, they gave it to me. I felt really comfortable there. Everyone treated me well, all of the guys."

Given all that and the fact that the Dodgers are the only team that have officially made Manny an offer, what seems to be the problem?

I know you want a four-year deal, Manny. And I want to be the princess of an island nation in the tropics and to have a staff position at the New Yorker. But that doesn’t mean that I would turn down a trip to Trinidad and freelance job at New York Magazine.

But, whatever. According to Manny, he has no say in the matter. He claims that “it's in God's hands.” While I think it’s pretty unlikely that God cares all that much about where Manny play baseball, it’s not impossible that God cares more than Scott Boras. That guy doesn’t seem to care at all. I just hope that after God makes this decision, Manny knows that he will have to be the one to actually show up to sign the contract.

Curt Schilling wrote a post for his blog a couple days ago entitled, “Shocked? You Just Can’t Be Anymore.” (Awesome title, by the way, Curt.) In his piece about the recent A-Roid scandal, Schilling said, “I’d be all for the 104 positives being named, and the game moving on if that is at all possible. In my opinion, if you don’t do that, then the other 600-700 players are going to be guilty by association, forever.”

Here’s the problem with that: It’s not at all possible. Sure, I agree with the sentiment, but under the collective bargaining agreement, those tests were to be confidential. Period. And even though I don’t support the use of steroids—at all—a deal’s a deal. Now, a leak is one thing, but you can’t just decide that because someone leaked one piece of confidential information, you’re going to blow the whole agreement to smithereens. But, whatever. Unless you’re Curt Schilling, I’m assuming that this is obvious.

In fact, for those other 103 juicers on the list; take heart. Baseball COO Bob DuPuy assures us that there is no need to lose faith in the confidentiality of the testing, saying, “I am comfortable [the] program is operated currently as it should be."

Seriously, Bob? Did your subscription to Sports Illustrated lapse, or are you just living in the Lake House?